This dissertation focuses on a theoretical study of interacting electrons in one dimension. The research elucidates the ground state (zero temperature) electronic phase diagram of an aluminum arsenide quantum wire which is an example of an interacting one dimensional electron liquid. Using one dimensional field theoretic methods involving abelian bosonization and the renormalization group we show the existence of a spin gapped quantum wire with electronic ground states such as charge density wave and singlet superconductivity. The superconducting state arises due to the unique umklapp interaction present in the aluminum arsenide quantum wire bandstructure discussed in this dissertation. It is characterized by Cooper pairs carrying a finite pairing momentum. This is a realization of the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin- Ovchinnikov state which is known to lead to inhomogeneous superconductivity. The dissertation also presents a theoretical analysis of the finite temperature single hole spectral function of the one dimensional electron liquid with gapless spin and charge modes (Luttinger liquid). The hole spectral function is measured in angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy experiments. The results predict a kink in the effective electronic dispersion of the Luttinger liquid. A systematic study of the temperature and interaction dependence of the kink provides an alternative way to detect spincharge separation in one dimensional systems where the peak due to the spin part of the spectral function is suppressed.
This dissertation focuses on a theoretical study of interacting electrons in one dimension. The research elucidates the ground state (zero temperature) electronic phase diagram of an aluminum arsenide quantum wire which is an example of an interacting one dimensional electron liquid. Using one dimensional field theoretic methods involving abelian bosonization and the renormalization group we show the existence of a spin gapped quantum wire with electronic ground states such as charge density wave and singlet superconductivity. The superconducting state arises due to the unique umklapp interaction present in the aluminum arsenide quantum wire bandstructure discussed in this dissertation. It is characterized by Cooper pairs carrying a finite pairing momentum. This is a realization of the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin- Ovchinnikov state which is known to lead to inhomogeneous superconductivity. The dissertation also presents a theoretical analysis of the finite temperature single hole spectral function of the one dimensional electron liquid with gapless spin and charge modes (Luttinger liquid). The hole spectral function is measured in angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy experiments. The results predict a kink in the effective electronic dispersion of the Luttinger liquid. A systematic study of the temperature and interaction dependence of the kink provides an alternative way to detect spincharge separation in one dimensional systems where the peak due to the spin part of the spectral function is suppressed.
This dissertation is devoted to theoretical studies of strongly interacting one-dimensional and quasi one-dimensional electron systems. The properties of one-dimensional electron systems can be studied within the bosonization technique, which presents fermions as collective bosonic density excitations. The power of this approach is the ability to treat electron-electron interaction exactly in the low-energy limit. The approach predicts the failure of Fermi liquid and an absence of long-range order in one-dimensions. The low-energy description of one-dimensional interacting systems is called the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid theory. For example, the edges of quantum Hall systems are one-dimensional and described by a chiral Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid. Another example is a quantum spin Hall system with helical edge states, which are also described by a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid. In our first work, a study of magnetized edge states of quantum spin-Hall system is presented. A magnetic field dependent signature of such edges is obtained, which can be verified in a Coulomb drag experiment. The second part of the dissertation is devoted to quasi-one dimensional antiferromagnetic lattices. A spatially anisotropic lattice antiferromagnet can be viewed as an array of one dimensional spin chains coupled in a way to match the lattice symmetry. This allows to use the non-Abelian bosonization technique to describe the low-energy physics of spin chains and study the inter-chain interactions perturbatively. The work presented in the dissertation studies the effect of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction on the magnetic phase diagram of the spatially anisotropic kagome antiferromagnet. We predict a Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction driven phase transition from Neel to Neel+dimer state. In the third work, a novel model of the fractional quantum Hall effect is given. Wave functions of two-dimensional electrons in strong and quantizing magnetic field are essentially one-dimensional. That invites one to use the one-dimensional phenomenological bosonization to describe the density fluctuations of the two-dimensional interacting electrons in magnetic field. Remarkably, the constructed trial bosonized fermion operator describing the electron states with a fixed Landau gauge momentum is effectively two-dimensional.
The properties of fermions in one dimension are markedly different from those in higher dimensions. In two or three dimensions, the many-body behaviour of fermions is described by the Fermi liquid model, whose most prominent result is that, instead of studying the behaviour of individual particles, it is better to describe the emergent phenomena of the whole system, known as quasiparticles. These are collective modes of excitations born out of particle-particle interactions, which resemble the constituent single particles, albeit with renormalised mass. In one dimension, however, the formation of such a correlated state is unfavourable and the quasiparticles are completely absent. Instead, 1D fermions are described by a model known as the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid. Central to this model is the process of bosonisation, a mathematical technique which maps the excitation of fermions to bosonic modes of spin-density and charge-density waves. As a prerequisite of the bosonisation technique, the fermionic single-particle dispersion is approximated as a linear function. Consequently, the Luttinger liquid model is limited in its scope of applicability. Specifically, it is valid only in the vicinity of the Fermi points, where the excitation energy is low. Recent advancement in the theoretical field has expanded our understanding of 1D interacting fermions beyond the limit of linearity. The mobile-impurity model, proposed by L. Glazman and his co-authors, is a generalised model of 1D fermions which extends the scope of applicability of the Tomanaga-Luttinger model, accounting for the curvature of single-particle dispersion relations. It extends the region of validity of the tradition TLL theory from the neighbourhood of the Fermi points to a band which follows the single-particle dispersion. This thesis presents the results of an experimental work which provides direct evidence of non-linear behaviour predicted by the new model. It revolves around the measurement of the spectral function of electrons in surface-gate-defined quantum wires on a double-quantum-well, GaAs/AlGaAs device, and the comparison and fitting of the result to the non-linear theory. The spectral function is a theoretical concept frequently used in discussions on many-body problems. Its physical interpretation makes it closely related to experimental observables, such as the tunnelling current between the double quantum wells in this work. This thesis consists of three parts. Part one concerns the theories of the various many-body models and the experimental technique: Chapter 1 briefly introduces the concept of Fermi liquid, before focusing on a detailed account of the Luttinger-liquid model. The mobile-impurity model will be introduced in the framework of the Luttinger liquid model afterwards, followed by a review of experimental works reported in the literature on the study of TLL physics. In Chapter 2, the principles of the experimental tunnelling spectroscopy technique are described. The second part of the thesis details the structure of the test device used in the experiment and its fabrication. In particular, we will discuss the intricacies of the three-dimensional EBL fabrication process developed specifically for this project. The setup and running of the measurement circuit will also be discussed in this part of the thesis, in the context of a prerequisite sample characterisation measurement. In the final part of the work, data from the main experiment will be presented and analysed, in search for the electron-electron interaction effects which are predicted by the theoretical discussions in the first chapter.
The Fermi liquid theory is a central concept in modern condensed matter physics used to describe conventional metals. A state of this universality class consists of well-defined quasiparticles, which occupy a finite number of states within a Fermi volume defined in momentum space. According to the Luttinger’s theorem, such a state encloses a Fermi volume proportional to the electron density modulo the filled bands if no symmetry is broken. In the past decades strong deviations from Fermi liquid theory have been observed in the scaling behavior of thermodynamic observables in different materials, among which are for instance cuprates and iron pnictides. This thesis is about two prototypical systems that can not be described by Fermi liquid theory. The first part of this work investigates two-dimensional effective models, which are in a Mott insulating state at half-filling and have a finite conductivity when doped with holes. In such a Mott insulating state, the charge carriers are strongly localized due to the Coulomb repulsion. Hence, strong correlations are assumed to have a strong impact on the formation of the ground state, also in the regime of small hole concentration. In a first project we have used a so-called spinon dopon mean-field theory to represent the two-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model with strong on-site repulsive interaction in effective degrees of freedom, in which the holes can be embedded into a quantum spin liquid. The corresponding SU(2) invariant ground state belongs to the class of fractionalized Fermi liquids. In a second project we investigate a quantum dimer model, an effective model based on a Hilbert space spanned by short range singlets and bound states of holes and spins. The focus here is on the calculation of the hole-part of the electron spectral function by using exact diagonalization and its comparison with two analytic methods, a diagrammatic computation based on the Bethe-Salpeter equation and a so-called two-mode approximation. The electron spectral function shows a similar analytic form in momentum space between nodal and antinodal point when compared to results from photoemission spectroscopy experiments on cuprates. Furthermore, in a subsequent work we calculate the exact ground state of the quantum dimer model along a certain parameter line. In order to analyze the behavior of the elctron spectral function when increasing the density of holes, we investigate the Fermi-Hubbard model in a current project using a dynamical mean-field approach. To solve the 4-site cluster impurity problem, we use a numerical renormalization group approach. However, numerical limitations force us to restrict the analysis to spin-polarized baths. According to the spectral data, the system is similar to the SU(2) invariant case at half-filling in a Mott insulating state and posseses a momentum-selective energy gap at finite doping. The topology of the Fermi surface shows a Lifshitz transition when increasing the hole concentration. Here, the curvature of the Fermi surface changes from electron- to hole-like. For comparison we apply the dynamical mean-field theory also to the quantum dimer model and observe that the electron spectral functions at finite doping are qualitatively similar to that of the two-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model. The second half of the work is about Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid theory, which is used to describe the low-energy effective degrees of freedom of one-dimensional systems. Here, we first discuss a conceptional extension of the operator-based bosonization theory for one-dimensional systems. This extension is especially suited for inhomogeneous one-dimensional systems. First, we investigate a one-dimensional system with a local interation potential and compute an exact solution of the single particle propagator at T = 0. The critical exponent of the single particle propagator has an unconventional form as a function of the microscopic Tomonaga-Luttinger parameters, which is not covered by the original Luttinger paradigm postulated by F. Duncan M. Haldane. In a second project on one-dimensional systems, we study the impact of scattering processes among bosonic low-energy excitations on the thermalization process. Such scattering processes are irrelevant on large length scales, however strongly affect the dynamics. In our analytic analysis we focus on a experimental setup, where a one-dimensional Bose gas is instantaneously splitted in two identical, however strongly correlated, halves of one-dimensional electronic systems. In the following, the corresponding non-equilibrium state runs through multiple regimes in time, such as a metastable prethermalization regime. However, above a certain threshold in time such scattering processes cause an effective thermalization of the system. In order to demonstrate this, we compute the kinetic equation in the Keldysh field integral formalism from a diagrammatic expansion based on a self-consistent Born approximation.
This thesis presents theoretical studies of strongly correlated systems as well as topologically ordered systems in 1D. Non-Fermi liquid behavior characteristic of interacting 1D electron systems is investigated with an emphasis on experimentally relevant setups and observables. The existence of end Majorana fermions in a 1D p-wave superconductor subject to periodic, incommensurate and disordered potentials is studied. The Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL), a model of interacting electrons in one spatial dimension, is considered in the context of two systems of experimental interest. First, a study of the electronic properties of single-walled armchair carbon nanotubes in the presence of transverse electric and magnetic fields is presented. As a result of their effect on the band structure and electron wave functions, fields alter the nature of the (effective) Coulomb interaction in tubes. In particular, it is found that fields couple to nanotube bands (or valleys), a quantum degree of freedom inherited from the underlying graphene lattice. As revealed by a detailed TLL calculation, it is predicted that fields induce electrons to disperse into their spin, band, and charge components. Fields also provide a means of tuning the shell-filling behavior associated with short tubes. The phenomenon of charge fractionalization is investigated in a one-dimensional ring. TLL theory predicts that momentum-resolved electrons injected into the ring will fractionalize into clockwise- and counterclockwise-moving quasiparticles. As a complement to transport measurements in quantum wires connected to leads, non-invasive measures involving the magnetic field profiles around the ring are proposed. Topological aspects of 1D p-wave superconductors are explored. The intimate connection between non-trivial topology (fermions) and spontaneous symmetry breaking (spins) in one-dimension is investigated. Building on this connection, a spin ladder system endowed with vortex degrees of freedom is proposed in order to study the effects that inhomogeneous potentials have on the topological phase diagram. Periodic vortex patterns yield a rich parameter space for tuning into a topologically non-trivial phase. This analysis hinges on the development of a topological invariant based on the wave function of Majorana fermions which inhabit the ends of the system and are robust to disorder. The method is generalized to aperiodic and disordered potentials. The topological phase diagram of such systems is studied; numerical and analytic results are found to be in close agreement.
One-dimensional (1D) interacting Fermi gases underpin a rich variety of quantum liquids, ranging from the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid and the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov paired state to the Luther-Emery liquid (LEL). Notably, the LEL-characterized by gapless excitations in charge or spin degree of freedom and gapped excitations in the other-has long been theoretically predicted but has eluded definitive experimental observation to date. By exactly solving the attractive Yang-Gaudin model via the Bethe ansatz, we fully determine the low-energy excitation spectra for both spin and charge channels. For fully paired fermions, the spectrum features gapped spin excitation coexisting with gapless charge excitation. We further employ bosonization to derive analytical expressions for the dynamical structure factor (DSF) of the gapped spin excitation, which is a long-standing challenge in this study. In the trapped gas, we find that the spin Bragg spectroscopy peak occurs at a much higher frequency than the charge-mode peak, where the splitting frequency between these two peaks scales approximately linearly with the interaction strength. Crucially, the spin gap manifests as a sharp threshold in the spin DSF, below which spectral weight is completely absent, proving a direct and unambiguous spectroscopic fingerprint of the LEL. Our work establishes quasi-1D trapped attractive Fermi gases as a pristine experimental platform for the long-sought direct observation of the LEL.
In this dissertation we use sophisticated numerical methods in order to examine ground-state (GS) properties of two types of quantum systems with electron electron interactions: A quantum dot (QD) and a nano-wire. In the first half of the work we study a system of a single level coupled to a one-dimensional wire with interacting spinless electrons, when the wire is either clean or disordered. We utilize the density-matrix renormalization-group (DMRG) method to investigate the influence of the level on several thermodynamic properties of the clean interacting wire, which can be in one of two phases: Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid and charge density wave phases. When the wire is disordered, we investigate the Friedel oscillations, exploring the difference between the two phases and comparing them to the clean non-interacting case, for which we develop an exact formula for the oscillations. In the second half of the dissertation we study two cases of an isolated two-dimensional QD. We begin by an investigation of a new numerical method, the particle-hole DMRG (PH-DMRG), which is used to calculate the GS energy of a disordered QD consisting of interacting spinless electrons. We show that this method is much more accurate than the Hartree-Fock method, and we suggest an improvement of the algorithm, which reduces the error rate by almost 30 percents. Finally we study the magnetization of a QD with spin 1/2 electrons, in the presence of spin-orbit coupling and interactions. We calculate the g-factor and the expectation values of the spin operators in the GS, and find that when the QD is occupied by an even number of electrons, the GS can have a finite magnetization.